Canonical unveils Ubuntu phone OS that doubles as a “full PC”

Seeking OEMs: Who will build Ubuntu phones?

Canonical today announced a new version of Ubuntu designed specifically for smartphones to power everything from entry-level handhelds to "high-end superphones" that double as PCs.

The move by Canonical was long expected, although it is coming late to a market already dominated by the iPhone and Android-based devices. Ubuntu for phones isn't a whole new operating system. Instead, it is a "smartphone interface" for Ubuntu. This helps Ubuntu differentiate from other phone operating systems by Voltron-ing itself into a full-fledged PC when docked to a monitor, mouse, and keyboard.

Ubuntu has previously been in the smartphone game with Android devices that become a modified Ubuntu PC when docked. This didn't make much of an impact, as the most prominent such device—the Motorola Atrix and lapdock—has been discontinued.

Ubuntu for Android is a separate product, which Canonical will continue to maintain. The newly announced version of Ubuntu will run on smartphones without any reliance on Android, however. This helps fulfill founder Mark Shuttleworth's promise of having Ubuntu become one operating system from phones to supercomputers.

There will be many challenges, primarily getting hardware partners on board. Canonical's press release today included supporting quotes from ARM and the makers of the Qt application framework, but none from smartphone manufacturers. On a new webpage describing Ubuntu for phones, Canonical tries to lure phone makers with the promise that "[w]e have the needs of network operators, OEMs, and ODMs in mind in bringing Ubuntu to the phone. It offers great performance on handsets with a low bill of materials, while opening up new opportunities for phone and PC convergence at the top end of the market."

Canonical will share more details this afternoon in a press conference and we will update this story with more information. For now, here is more of what we know.

The Ubuntu interface will feature the following:

1. Edge magic: thumb gestures from all four edges of the screen enable users to find content and switch between apps faster than other phones.

4. Voice and text commands in any application for faster access to rich capabilities.

5. Both native and Web or HTML5 apps.

6. Evolving personalized art on the welcome screen.

Entry-level Ubuntu phones will require a 1Ghz Cortex A9 processor and between 512MB and 1GB of memory, while the high-end superphones that double as PCs will require a quad-core A9 or Intel Atom processor and at least 1GB RAM.

Canonical will try to avoid the type of fragmentation that affected Android by providing "engineering services to offload the complexity of maintaining multiple code bases… freeing the manufacturer to focus on hardware design and integration," the company said. "For silicon vendors, Ubuntu is compatible with a typical Android Board Support Package (BSP). This means Ubuntu is ready to run on the most cost-efficient chipset designs."

Canonical also said Ubuntu for phones "doesn’t have the overhead of a Java virtual machine, so all core applications run at full native speeds with a small memory footprint." A QML toolkit and sample application are available for developers to download. A forthcoming Ubuntu software development kit will make it easier to build applications that run on both the desktop and phone.

The Ubuntu Software Centre will be extended to phones for use as an app store, but sadly it sounds like Ubuntu phones will get some of the same carrier-built apps that come with many Android devices and are generally useless. Canonical said, "Ubuntu offers compelling customization options for partner apps, content, and services. Operators and OEMs can easily add their own branded offerings. Canonical’s personal cloud service, Ubuntu One, provides storage and media services, file sharing and a secure transaction service which enables partners to integrate their own service offerings easily."

Web apps will also play a big role, with Canonical's "unique Web app system [that] lets you quickly adapt any Web property for installation as an app on the phone, running independently of the browser, with its own icon and access to system services."

In addition to low-cost smartphones, Ubuntu will help OEMs build a "single enterprise superphone" that converges phone, PC, and thin client into one (in Canonical's words). Canonical noted that Asus, Dell, HP, and Lenovo all certify the majority of their PCs to run Ubuntu, but it did not say whether any of these companies plan to make any smartphone/PC hybrids using Ubuntu. That will be one of the things we'll try to find out at this afternoon's press conference, along with timing on when an Ubuntu phone will actually hit the market.

UPDATES: Here are a few more tidbits we've learned from Canonical's press conference:

No carriers and handset makers were announced, but Shuttleworth is aiming for a phone to be released in the last quarter of 2013 or the first quarter of 2014.

Given that Ubuntu is open source, a full Ubuntu image that can run on a Galaxy Nexus will be available within a few days or weeks.

Ubuntu 14.04 (the release in April 2014) will be one image that works across phones, tablets, and desktops.

Ubuntu for Android is not dead. "We do expect Ubuntu for Android to ship on marquee devices in 2013, and it will have a multi-year lifecycle," Shuttleworth said. "It enables our partners and ourselves to start opening up the convergence superphone market where you have a phone that can also be a desktop when you'd dock it, without losing some of the things you value in Android itself."

Building a market for phones that double as PCs has "been a long and slow process because it's essentially a category that doesn't exist today," Shuttleworth said.

Canonical gave reporters some hands-on time with an Ubuntu phone prototype in London today, and will do the same next week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

I do not want ANOTHER phone OS at this point. There's too many unsupported or poorly supported platforms as is. Let's shake out the stragglers we already have first, then move into Round 2 when there's more room for things like this and the Mozilla initiative.

Having said that, I'd like to see the "desktop UI when docked" implemented. I don't see why it couldn't be done with Windows Phone 8 and (especially) Android, given that the former shares a lot with Windows RT/8 and the latter could use the open sourced bits from Canonical.

Hmm, the big idea of having a phone turn in to a full PC when docked seems good. An awful lot of computer fits in your pocket today.

Problem is I have faith in Canonical's lack of user interface taste. They will ruin this just like they ruined the PC desktop. I do hope they prove me wrong but I will not spend any time on this until that proof is overwhelming. You only get to Unity me once.

Did anyone else notice that they're encouraging QML development or that they're using Qt for the new interface?

Gnome has always been pure C over C++, and GTK over Qt. Canonical has publicly admired Qt, but always shipped a Gnome distribution, with all their shells/interfaces developed in GTK.

I wonder if this might be a sign of things to come for Ubuntu's desktop interfaces. With KDE/Qt/Plasma, you can easily change shells on the fly. And I've long wondered how long it would take to create a Unity desktop shell in Qt/Plasma.

The early adopter in my shouts "yes," but the person that has felt the lack of support and apps on webOS then Windows Phone since 2009 is hesitant.

Not to derail the conversation, but compairing webOS and Windows Phone are very different things. webOS is not being pushed, marketed or sold, Windows Phone is. While there is an awareness issue for Windows Phone, most of the top apps are available. I'm not saying there aren't issues or that there isn't room for improvement there because there absolutly is; however, Windows Phone has room to get better, as it is activly supported by Microsoft.

While I think that there will be app issues for these phones (if they come to market) if the platform is supported by Canonical like WP is supported by Microsoft, developers will get on the band wagon and apps will start showing up, and then eventually the big brands will show up as well.

I'm interested, but worry about updates. Too many things break with updates.

This has been my experience with Ubuntu as well. The more I stick to LTS releases, the more stuff just keeps working. I like the 6 month update cycle, but I've found enough things break that I only try it out on my test machine.

What would be super awesome is if the dock had extra horsepower to handle the desktop workload. Imagine docking an Atom powered phone into an Ivy Bridge powered dock. Take pictures and videos on your smartphone, and edit and encode them while docked.

While Android's Java/Dalvik layer slows things down, I like the degree of platform-independence it brings. It seems without it, you have to either:

1) Force developers to maintain parallel executables for different flavors of ARM (and maybe Intel if they make any headway)or2) anoint a particular ARM flavor as your Official Hardware.

Maybe there's an alternate solution-- something like Apple's Universal Binary format or some other format that supports parallel machine languages.

Yeah!, usually, developers trade for their own convenience ,to produce more junk software per second, for less efficient software to the end user. Of course, a more powerful and non-free processor will come in six months to handle that junky software.

I would love to try loading this on an old Samsung Captivate I have laying around. They need to find a way to make loading these operating systems as easy as it is on a PC; actually, that goes for all smartphones. Users should be able to take the hardware and load up Ubuntu, WP8, or (shudder) Android, if they so choose. And it shouldn't be an overly complicated process that voids hardware warranties or likely bricks your device.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Android fragmentation will eventually harm the platform. I know it sounds crazy, but OEMs are making it way too complicated to stick with Android. My Samsung Captivate wouldn't sync with my computer because the Kies software only worked for Galaxy S II and III devices, so there was no way to back it up. You can't update to the newest software because the manufacturers block it. If Ubuntu gets it right, I don't see any reason they can't find a place in the mobile handset world alongside the other offerings. I hope they do.

I would love to try loading this on an old Samsung Captivate I have laying around. They need to find a way to make loading these operating systems as easy as it is on a PC; actually, that goes for all smartphones. Users should be able to take the hardware and load up Ubuntu, WP8, or (shudder) Android, if they so choose. And it shouldn't be an overly complicated process that voids hardware warranties or likely bricks your device.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Android fragmentation will eventually harm the platform. I know it sounds crazy, but OEMs are making it way too complicated to stick with Android. My Samsung Captivate wouldn't sync with my computer because the Kies software only worked for Galaxy S II and III devices, so there was no way to back it up. You can't update to the newest software because the manufacturers block it. If Ubuntu gets it right, I don't see any reason they can't find a place in the mobile handset world alongside the other offerings. I hope they do.

It isn't a Java Mobile VM, but it is a Java virtual machine, because it runs Java code. So you can call it any other way you like, but it doesn't change the fact that it uses a virtual machine to run Java code.

I do, however, seeing enthusiasts flashing existing phone hardware with this OS. It's similar to how OEM computers shipping with Ubuntu aren't common (yes, I know Dell does, but like I said...). While it's out there, Linux survives, is used, and the vast majority of installs are by enthusiasts who install it onto computers that did not ship with it installed.

So do they call the phone interface Unity, or something else? And when it's docked does it only go to Unity, or can you have it default to KDE, Xfce, etc?

If this has anything to do with Unity then I'm not interested. If other desktop environments are available, then I'm very interested.

Would love it if phone manufacturers would start supporting multiple OSes so you could install whatever you want, and there's drivers available. I'm dreaming though. Wouldn't it make a ton of sense for a manufacturer to release the same handset, but shipping with either Win 8 or Android? Seems like it would save them a ton of money vs developing separate hardware. I want an HTC 8x, but with Android!

Wait a second. Is this "yet another smart phone OS" or just Linux with phone apps? Or a Hypervisor?

It looks like the Ubuntu/Android was a hypervisor approach.

It looks like this phone approach is just ARM Ubuntu with phone apps. The presence and suggesting of using QML (Qt) for phone apps suggests this is no longer the hypervisor approach. it in fact looks like a replacement for the Nokia N9, complete with gestures.

So I don't think you're looking at another smart phone OS. I Think you're looking at the continuation of MeeGo (in a way) and the full-on, proper, Linux on on a smartphone (like the N9 was).[Edit: to elaborate: You can write HTML5 apps, your can write QML apps. Your QML apps will work the same between phone mode, desktop linux, windows, OSX, (and soon iOS and Android) so only if you made a native Android or iOS app will you have any work to do. But the work you do will be able to be used on iOS or Android as the Qt support progresses on those platforms. ]

This is amazing in terms of potential in that Linux will get more QML apps, and your phone and your desktop will be one and the same... Also, we might get that multi-persona phone thanks to a modified login prompt.

I think this news is so big, we are having trouble appreciating how pivotal it is.